FF: Busy Week

Despite a very busy week, I managed to squeeze in reading time.

Kwhahe’e Contemplates Ravens

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week. Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list. If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column. It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater. Solid conclusion to the excellent “Raven Cycle.”

Guinea Dog by Patrick Jennings. Middle grade. I still like the cover, but I am always concerned about books that misrepresent animal behavior, even when – as in this book – there is eventually a gimmick to explain it.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Audiobook. Read by David Case, who is one of my personal favorite readers. Enjoyed. Again. I’d forgotten how much Wodehouse’s language can carry me along.

The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie by John Bellairs, posthumous completed by Brad Strickland. I’m a great admirer of Bellair’s middle grade horror/mysteries. Somehow, I’d missed this one. Strickland does a good job keeping the feel of Bellairs’ prose without be strangled by it.

In Progress:

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie. Audiobook. Reader has no idea how to do American accents, but otherwise is fine. Miss Marple looks for trouble – and finds it. An old favorite.

Nobody’s Princess by Esther Friesner. Helen of Troy was a Spartan. Esther Friesner brings out a new dimension of a classic mythological figure.

Also:

I’m still behind on Archeology and Smithsonian, and now quarterly periodicals are coming in. Arrgh!

4 Responses to “FF: Busy Week”

I know what you mean about animal behaviour – I can still remember how upset I was to discover that life in the woods wasn’t at all like Whitefoot the Woodmouse or Paddy the Beaver. And Burgess, AFAICT, really did know the animals he used as characters. The problem stems from turning them into characters in the first place.

Is Friesner turning Helen into a Classical Spartan woman? An interesting take, but seriously anachronistic. Or is she trying to reconstruct whatever it is that lies behind the Heroic Age women constantly popping up in the later mythology?

Friesner’s take on Helen is that anyone with Castor and Pollux as brothers just might have some interesting thoughts… She does a lot with suppositions about Spartan culture and explains her choices in the author’s note.

Just finished “Robert B. Parker’s Kickback” by Ace Atkins, who does a good job of channeling Parker’s Spenser series. Parker may be gone but Spenser lives. Some of Parker’s other franchises are being continued by other writers as well, but Atkins strikes me as best at sounding like Parker.

I’m okay as long as the book doesn’t make you forget yourself. The guidance from your packs and my real sincere compassion combined I’m touched peacefully. It’s relaxation and self-satisfaction the wolves help me increase quickly. Without the messages I’ve found from their stories I’d be walking like a drifter. And then my real enthusiasm of wolves.

Repeatedly Male Wolves help me picture attitude and safety while the female wolves are busy in the wolf stories and help me with my vocabulary, both have made quotes clearer. I understand their real hearts and souls enough that the wolves help me put my emotional puzzles together without struggling too much.

This Week’s best lessons were about preparation, with some help from The Coming Of Hoole and the book of Avi’s called Old Wolf.